Those WUWT comments, as they often do, remind me of Terry Pratchett's 'some minds you couldn't change with a hatchet'.

These are the rusted-on idiots, completely impervious to inconvenient information. Even if we manage to recreate the Eocene Thermal Maximum these guys and their ilk will still be announcing it has been cooling since last Wednesday, and anyway it was much warmer in the Hadean!

Like Trump fans they'd be merely pathetic if they weren't so fricking dangerous (and, let's face it, those are strongly overlapping sets!)

I have found it interesting that climate science moves on, more peer-reviewed analyses are published, the world warms more, Arctic sea ice melts more, sea levels rise more, etc. Yet the comments on WUWT stay the same. Is it that the minds are rusted-on? Or is it from new people enjoying the wonders of climate denial and thinking that what they are reading is reality-based? Has anyone assessed the half-life of active commenters on WUWT?

After the Pause excursion we are right back to what we were hearing thirty years ago - the models are wrong, the data is manipulated, climate always changes, clouds, UHI, what are they hiding, heretics, Galileo, would a British viscount lie to you? In Latin?

Thinking of which, the Vatican's inclusion in the conspiracy of all time is something new. Can't say I saw that coming.

My empirical hypothesis is that AGW denial has become so embarrassing to try to uphold that anyone with half a brain stepped outside the echo chamber for a breath of air, and ran away when nobody was looking.

The five mass extinction events that the earth has so far experienced have impacted coral reefs as much or more than any other major ecosystem. Each has left the Earth without living reefs for at least four million years, intervals so great that they are commonly referred to as ‘reef gaps’ (geological intervals where there are no remnants of what might have been living reefs). The causes attributed to each mass extinction are reviewed and summarised. When these causes and the reef gaps that follow them are examined in the light of the biology of extant corals and their Pleistocene history, most can be discarded. Causes are divided into (1) those which are independent of the carbon cycle: direct physical destruction from bolides, ‘nuclear winters’ induced by dust clouds, sea-level changes, loss of area during sea-level regressions, loss of biodiversity, low and high temperatures, salinity, diseases and toxins and extraterrestrial events and (2) those linked to the carbon cycle: acid rain, hydrogen sulphide, oxygen and anoxia, methane, carbon dioxide, changes in ocean chemistry and pH. By process of elimination, primary causes of mass extinctions are linked in various ways to the carbon cycle in general and ocean chemistry in particular with clear association with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The prospect of ocean acidification is potentially the most serious of all predicted outcomes of anthropogenic carbon dioxide increase. This study concludes that acidification has the potential to trigger a sixth mass extinction event and to do so independently of anthropogenic extinctions that are currently taking place.

I get that deniers are having to deal with the collapse of coral reefs all over the world, particularly around Australia.

If I remember, the stages of denial are: 1) it's not happening, 2) it's happening but we're not doing it, 3) we're doing it but it's not that big a deal, 4) it is a big deal but it'd be too expensive to fix, and 5) it's too late.

Steele's paper is a mix between 2 and 3. He can't say it isn't happening, so he says we're not responsible for bleached corals, but even if we are, it's nothing to be concerned about.

Since we have an open thread here, this is a good time to share a little audio clip that shows what a laughingstock Fox News is with the American scientific community.

Last month, Professor Jeff Severinghaus delivered the Keeling Memorial Lecture at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Listen to this 10-second audio clip to hear how the audience reacted when he uttered the words "Fox News" (the audio quality not the greatest; you have to listen closely to hear the speaker).

"The world’s oceans contain enough cold water to quench any imaginable anthropogenic global warming for hundreds, more likely thousands of years. If that deep water is upwelling around Antarctica, keeping the Southern Ocean cold, it is difficult to see how significant global warming can occur, or significant Antarctic contribution to sea level rise can occur, until that reservoir of freezing cold deep ocean water is finally depleted."

See, nothing to worry about, we can go back to burning as much oil as we can, as fast as we can, the oceans stored cold will take care of all the CO2-retained heat, and then some.

Proposal: we should drop the word "equlibrium" from the term "climate sensitivity". It's misleading & dangerous.

It's true that the physics imply that temperatures will stabilise for centuries, perhaps millennia, as the ice sheets melt. Ice responds to warming first by reaching ~0° C, at which point the energy of warming goes into melting ice. After the completion of this phase change, as warming continues, water warms up again.

So with warming, temperatures will (approximately) stabilise for a time, but the ice sheets will be melting chaotically, causing bursts of sea level rise that will be unpredictable & incredibly destructive - not to mention permanent on human time scales, since it would take tens of millennia to rebuild the ice sheets.

So how about it? Let's stop using the word "eqilibrium" attached to "climate sensitivity"; the only meaningful equilibrium is Earth system sensitivity, which applies after the ice sheets melt & albedo falls as a result. What do others think?

I can't see why ECS should be changed, it IS an equilibrium measurement. I would rather call a spade a spade.

I don't think the heat absorption by the ice melting is all that significant (it goes into latent heat) - most of the globe's water is already above freezing. Unless you have the figures?

At one point I was willing to bet on the probability that global warming will cause sea level to fall - increased precipitation over Antarctica will lock up more water. But it now seems pretty certain that Greenland will continue to lose ice as it is not cold enough, and the wild card is Antarctica ice shelf collapse due to a warmer ocean.

I didn't say climate sensitivity was irrelevant, I just said it was misleading to call it an "equilibrium". Chaotically rising sea level as ice sheets melt would be for humans a very uncomfortable "equilibrium" indeed, even though warming would stop temporarily.

The temperature response to CO2 is U-shaped, though, with runaway cooling leading to snowball events at low levels & runaway warming leading to Venusian-type conditions with high levels.

I believe that accumulating evidence is telling us the EAIS is indeed vulnerable to warming oceans (even if it takes centuries), & increased precipitation won't be enough to offset ablation at the edges.

I didn't say climate sensitivity was irrelevant, I just said it was misleading to call it an "equilibrium".

I know what you mean but disagree with your use of "misleading" in this context. I think the problem arises when these formalisms are encountered by people who aren't familiar with their correct definitions. There's no attempt to mislead, but technical discussions of climate science require the participants to get the terminology straight. In other words, it's on us, not on scientists, who in no way can be said to have misled anyone.

I have compelling proof that Dave Stealey (aka smokey et al) is still a mod at WUWT. Two hours after a thread closed at WUWT after its two week run, 10 comments appeared in a matter of minutes. Poor smokey had his ass handed to him and this is the only way he could save face. https://archive.is/qhQg7

Unfortunately he forgot about timestamps, there is no way to argue those post weren't made after comments closed.

I have been informed off the record that there were alterations and removal of comments on that thread, vanishing without a trace..

barry, give it up. I made the second comment in this thread, but you didn’t like it. So you cherry-picked an extremely short time slice out of the entire record — the same thing the NSIDC is trying to do to claim that the current ‘ice’ variability is un-natural.

Smokey literally will say *anything* to "win" a point, even if it torpedoes his own frequent past behaviour ... and especially if it doesn't even apply to the actual conversation he's blundered into.

Apparently DB went off on a conspiracy theory rant as per his usual, Saul from Montreal pointed out it made WUWT look ridiculous and Willard Tony agreed. There was some discussion about it here a few articles back, I didn't see it first hand so I may have the details wrong.

What appears to have happened is that Watts has admitted that Stealey is still a moderator and abused his authority by posting comments on a thread that was closed. Saul from Montreal got the better of him and Stealey came back after comments closed and posted around a dozen comments.

Well, I did say clearly several times when I thought an article had drifted over into total Conspiracy Theory territory. And I upset Bob Tisdale once or twice.

And I always gave DBStealy a serving when he lashed out with his trollish comments, he did not like me calling him a woof woof. Comments like his make me wonder about the state of his mental health, he must realize he is making a fool of himself in public.

Tisdale is easy to upset, simply waste his time asking him a perfectly reasonable question which is sceptical of one of his arguments.

No, I can't imagine DBS likes being called an attack poodle. We'll never know for sure, but how I figure it is he knows what he's peddling is rank bullshit, but he's banking on his fans not knowing the difference.

Of course they do and probably 98% of them don't even look at an abstract. And in many cases the person supplying the link probably has not read it either, just was impressed by a catchy title. Happens all the time.

"I didn’t think this needed to be said, but for all you people who think dbstealey was a sacrificial lamb being used to maintain the air of integrity, you’ve been had. That’s not why this happened. This happened because dbstealey has a long history of writing abusive, paranoid rants and they have been a constant source of embarrassment for our host. The behavior in the last few weeks has been particularly embarrassing, to the point our host has had to step in and delete his comments multiple times because of how bad they were.

99% of the posts I ever read on WUWT are bat sh1t crazy conspiracy rants, and I suspect Watts is simply tired of it

he seems like a weary king canute figure, trying to hold back the rising tide of paranoid delusional claptrap that gets posted

Willard Watts hasn't addressed the fact that several of Saul's comments that were visible at the time the comment thread closed were made to vanish down the memory hole without a trace.Nor was there mention of the numerous sock-puppets used by Dave Stealey or the fact that Stealey was a covert Mod, not on the list posted at WUWT. The plot thickens!

Well that appears to confirm Dave Stealey is a moderator. I always thought he was. It is incredible a blog would allow someone of that character to be a mod, even a bad Conspiracy Theory blog like WUWT.

I famously hate Stealey's guts but in his defence that sort of comment can be found on every anti-mitigation site on the Web. (Many such comments happily exist on CE). The most fantastic conspiratorial ideation comes from Lord Haw-Haw to which Anthony fervently genuflects. Consistency has never been his strong suite and that's unlikely to change, but his new non-smokey policy is weirdly compelling.

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All you need to know about WUWT

WUWT insider Willis Eschenbach tells you all you need to know about Anthony Watts and his blog, WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). As part of his scathing commentary, Wondering Willis accuses Anthony Watts of being clueless about the blog articles he posts. To paraphrase:

Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece...(he couldn't tell if it would)... stand the harsh light of public exposure.

Definition of Denier (Oxford): A person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.
‘a prominent denier of global warming’
‘a climate change denier’

Alternative definition: A former French coin, equal to one twelfth of a Sou, which was withdrawn in the 19th century. Oxford. (The denier has since resurfaced with reduced value.)